Nate Silver, on how a Columbia student should prepare for the real world:

I guess I’d start with the most generic advice: learn how to code. The market is tough for journalists in general, but the exception is if you also know how to code. The other thing I realized is that getting the sense for what the metabolism for a journalistic office is is very important. If you really want to get into journalism then look for an internship in a newsroom. It’ll pay less, but you’ll have a lot of different experiences which will be very important. We also have a couple positions open too: we’re looking for a Visual Journalist (I’m not sure if that’s posted yet). We also have Internships. For the first time we’ve started to accept some freelance visualization work too.